Saturday, November 15, 2008

On Friday, November 21st, 2008, I'll be speaking at The National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention in San Antonio, Texas about using literacy to confront bullying and cyber-Bullying. The bullying research is sobering. “ 160,000 children miss school every day for fear of being bullied (Pollack, 1998).” Bullying occurs more often in middle school than in high school (Nansel, Overpeck, Pilla, Ruan, Simons-Morton & Scheidt, 2001). And because cyber-bullying is anonymous and often unsupervised, it is even more problematic.

Any form of bullying is detrimental to more than just the victim.The posttraumatic stress that children experience as “either victims of or witnesses to violence includes intrusive imagery, emotional constriction or avoidance, fears of recurrence, sleep difficulties,and disinterest in significant activities…(APA, 1993)."

Alice Miller believes that one person can make a difference in the life of a child who is bullied and subjected to violence. She calls this person a helping witness which could also be described as an ally (Miller, 2001). It is my premise that the stories, themes and lessons of history and modern life can be used to examine how people have dealt with bullying and harrassment in productive ways (Henkin, 2005).Through literature and writing, “…we can help students develop a rich array of strategies” to deal with bullying (Henkin, 2005.)" If we want students capable of making ethical decisions, we need to bring up matters of conscience over and over again (Coles, 1998). By reading, writing and thinking about bullying, we offer students “the thousands of ethical conversations” they need to develop into strong, literate adults.

The following bullying narrative comes from the research I've been doing in middle school classrooms. We asked students to write bully narratives, and then analyzed them for themes. One of themes was that teachers don't do as they say. The following statement is representative of this.

"My advice would be to you (adults) to do what you say. Your advice works sometimes but you need a new method."

Students wrote that when they followed the teachers' advice, they were often ignored, or that nothing was done about it.

During our session, we will be sharing some of this research and discussing how literacy can help students confront bullying and cyber-bullying issues and develop strategies to deal with it. The handout for the session is also posted on this blog.

The National Council of Teachers of English Annual ConventionSan Antonio, Texas, November 2008

• www.antibullying.net This Antibullying Network comes from Scotland; it disseminates many ideas about bullying in schools and how it can be tackled• www.wcwonline.org/bullying/index.html The Project on Teasing and Bullying is part of the Wellesley Centers for Women. The website describes the projects goals, activities and training.

• www.passion-4.net/bullying/index.shtml This is a list of the one hundred bullying websites on the internet• http://www.cyberbullying.us/ A clearinghouse with information on cyber-bullying

• http://dontlaugh.org This is the Operation Respect: Don’t Laugh at Me site, founded by Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary.• http://groundspark.org This website promotes the extraordinary films that Debra Chasnoff has created including Let’s Get Real

Profile

I am a Professor Emeritus at The University of Texas at San Antonio. I have been honored with the Illinois Master Teaching Award, the National-Louis University Outstanding Faculty Award (2001), and the University of Texas at San Antonio, College of Education Awards for Teaching Excellence for Tenured Faculty in 2007-2008, and the 2009 Presidential Award for Community Service. My work has been acknowledged by the 2009 National Council of Teachers of English Halle Award, the 2015 Outstanding Literacy Alumni Award from Northern Illinois University and the 2012 Headline Award for Excellence in Education. I am currently President-Elect for the The Whole Language Umbrella, an International Literacy Organization.
I am also the Director Emeritus of the San Antonio Writing Project. I've also published two books, Who's Invited to Share?: Using Literacy to Teach for Equity and Social Justice and Confronting Bullying: Literacy as a Tool for Character Education, both published by Heinemann. I have also published many scholarly articles.